Deep Sleep (The Salt Mine Book 17) by Joseph Browning & Suzi Yee

Author:Joseph Browning & Suzi Yee [Browning, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Expeditious Retreat Press
Published: 2022-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

New York City, New York

26th of March, 1:50 p.m. (GMT-4)

Wilson sat in a parked rental van waiting for Nasim Nagano to leave for his afternoon coffee. The car and pedestrian traffic passed by him indifferent to his presence; they had their own business to attend to. It was one of the things Wilson liked about New York—the ability to be anonymous in a crowd. It allowed him to feel part of something while remaining separate, like a single drop of water in a wave rolling across the sea. The city might have whitewashed the grimy parts to make them more palatable, but its inhabitants were still New Yorkers at heart. Someone was going to have to do more than exist for anyone to give a damn.

Wilson had come to the city many times for work, and the more unique cases stood out in his memory. The time someone summoned an actual leprechaun and it got loose during the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. That one Christmas someone had enchanted the Salvation Army handbells to boost donations with unintended collateral damage—he’d had to scour the city to collect them all and bell ringers turned out to be a feisty lot. And the evil animated stuffed animal he’d stalked through the FAO Schwarz on Fifth Avenue. That wasn’t there anymore. Thirteen years...who would have thought?

The sight of Nagano leaving the building broke his reminiscing. His eyes followed closely until he turned the corner onto Broadway. Wilson waited a minute to make sure he was gone and then climbed out of the van and got to work. Dressed in worn navy coveralls and thick work boots, he put a hardhat on and grabbed his clipboard and bag. The doorman looked at him askance as he approached the thick awning hanging over the entrance of Avalon Midtown and took the three steps elevating the entrance from the sidewalk.

“Can I help you, sir?” the portly, middle-aged man in the uniform politely inquired in a slight Jamaican accent.

“I’m here to collect samples from the cooling tower,” he said officiously. A few years ago, New York had an outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease and after that, the city started requiring regular testing.

“Someone just came last month,” the doorman replied.

Think, think, think... “I don’t know about that. I just go where they tell me,” Wilson replied with an indifferent shrug. He lined the words and gestures with a thin veneer of his will, nudging the doorman to see it his way, worker to worker.

The doorman’s face softened. Been there, done that. “Use elevator one,” he instructed Wilson before looking around and lowering his voice. “The maintenance access code is 6467.” Then, he opened the door for him.

“Appreciate it,” Wilson tersely replied as he stepped inside. The lobby was marble and polished steel illuminated by a floating installation of metal rods with lights attached. It was an attempt at lighting as architecture, but it looked more like a giant game of pick-up sticks that had gotten terribly out of hand.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.